The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

of God are without repentance," that is, there is no vacillation, repentance,
or fluctuation of mind in God. But when to these absolute words is added:
"Do this in remembrance of me," there comes in something dependent
upon man's will, and which may, therefore, fluctuate. As it is true, even of
the man that perishes, that Christ's body was broken and His blood shed
for him, “for our Lord Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, tasted death for
every man;" as it is true that every man in the Resurrection shall be called
forth from the grave, for "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made
alive," though some shall rise to glory, and others to shame; so is it true
that every man, however unworthy, sacramentally partakes of the body and
blood of Christ in the Supper, though it be to his own condemnation. As
the unbelieving, under the Old Dispensation, were, equally with the
believing, outwardly sprinkled with the blood of the covenant, though they
received not, for lack of faith, its blessings; as those who are unbelieving
and baptized receive the baptism itself in its sacramental entireness, though
they do not appropriate its blessings, so do the communicants in the Holy
Supper confirm the testimony, that, although unbelief shuts us out from the
blessings of the promises and ordinances, we cannot thereby make them
of none effect. Our faith does not make, and our unbelief cannot unmake
them. The same objective reality is in every case presented, and in every
case it is one and the same thing, whose benefits faith appropriates, and
unbelief rejects.
That Judas was at the Supper of the Lord seems highly probable.
Matthew and Mark, after telling us that our Lord "sat down with the
twelve," describe the Institution of the Supper without giving a hint of the
departure of Judas. Luke, who proposed to write "in order," and who is
generally regarded as most precise in his chronology, in direct connection
with the words of the Supper, immediately after them, tells us our Lord
said: "But, behold! the hand of him that betrayeth Me is with Me on the
table." (Luke xxii. 21.) The force of the word "immediately," in John xiii.
30, is not such as to exclude the possibility of what Luke seems so
distinctly to assert, and what the two other synoptical evangelists more